Fail Like a Poet: Ambition and Failure in Christian Wiman’s ‘He Held Radical Light’

Related Books:

I was 23 when I first read My Bright Abyss: Meditations of Modern Believer, Christian Wiman’s stirring poetic memoir on art and faith in the face of death. I was dizzy with ambition, full of passion but unsure of where to put it, so it felt like Wiman was speaking directly to me when he wrote, “So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence on existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt, and you are pursuing a ghost.” It’s one of many passages that reads like one side of a correspondence between a seasoned writer and a young, ambitious one, like me—a contemporary Rilke tossing hard-earned pearls of wisdom from success’s far shore.

Wiman spends much of Abyss recounting the early days of his life as a poet when he pursued the aforementioned ghost, and how he eventually sacrificed that ambition for a purer and more rigorous one, aimed not for lesser eternities like fame or reputation, but animated by “that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated, and all you want is the poem.” In this kind of writing, this kind of life, the individual artistic self is willingly snuffed out for the sake of the truer, bigger art it pursues. The way to channel my own ambition, Wiman seemed to be telling me, was to sanctify it, which to me meant scrubbing the rank smell of the self from its pores. This charge is present in his new and similarly stunning memoir, He Held Radical Light, though I can’t help but feel his latest book is less a reiteration of that charge than a response to the questions that emerge after one accepts such a radical call.

My Bright Abyss has become nothing less than a cornerstone for a small but deeply serious contingent of faith-intrigued artists in my generation. Acolytes of Marilynne Robinson, Mary Oliver, or Annie Dillard might consider Wiman of the same ilk, a writer of both high literary merit and great spiritual depth. A mentor put Abyss in my hands in my first aimless year out of college, when the possibility of pursuing a life of art, an art which aspired to the standard Wiman put forth, was still something I could decide not to do. But his ultimate purpose in Abyss was more urgent and worthwhile than any I’d considered until that point in my life: to resurrect the lifeless body of religious language in order to adequately approach the spiritual conundrums of modern life. Wiman knew that the old well of spiritual metaphors and symbols had gone dry, but instead of cursing the soil, he set out with a divining rod to find new springs. And he urged a whole generation of other writers to do the same. So, I committed—one might say converted—to a life I did not know how to live, a life where art and faith were so tightly woven that to unravel one thread might put too much tension on the other. Pulled taught, it wouldn’t be long before one of them snapped.

“Poetry
itself,” writes Wiman, early in Radical
Light “like love, like any spiritual hunger—thrives on longings that can
never be fulfilled, and dies when the poet thinks they have been.” This fits
with the earlier image of the insatiable, selfless artist, who erases her
tracks as she marches further into the dark; satisfaction with one’s work
equals artistic death. But its appearance so early in the book alerts the
reader that Wiman may not consider this the key
to an artistic life but the cost of
it. More accurately, it’s both, but Wiman has oriented the thrust of Radical Light around the recurring
realization of every serious artist that the molten core “at the heart of
creation itself” which once pulled him to an urgent, selfless art is the same
fire that would inevitably burn him.

In an interview with On Being’sKrista Tippet from 2014, Wiman mentions the modern tendency to favor the self and neglect the soul. True as this may be for many Americans, I suspect that the kind of person who gravitates to Wiman’s work in the first place may be more inclined to the inverse. In the hands of a young writer who’s embraced the self-obliterating art that looks a lot like faith—the kind of writer who considers satisfaction a sign of death—this plea for balance becomes a stick to beat back the needy hound that is the self. A self needs affirmation, needs companionship, needs a “real mattress”—things which may seem superfluous, even detrimental, when positioned against the needs of a soul.

Three
hard-scrabble years into a frantic but still exciting life as a writer, led
into the Abyss by Wiman’s ethereal hand, it occurred to me that fierce commitment
to my own artistic craft simply wasn’t enough; total devotion meant congruence
between private art and public work. I had a challenging but generally
fulfilling job teaching writing to high school seniors on the Southwest side of
Chicago, but I still felt a lack of artistic purpose. I wanted more—more art,
more meaning, more…something. So, I moved from Chicago to Seattle to take a job
at a small but well-respected literary magazine that tended to the intersection
of art and faith. A crucial section of My
Bright Abyss had originally been published in the magazine’s pages. Even
though the job was largely administrative, promising only modest editorial
input, I took it. I would have taken it if they’d hired me to clean the
gutters.

What narrative thrust exists in a book that relies mostly on poetry for dramatic effect surrounds Wiman’s experiences as the editor of Poetry Magazine and his eventual departure for a teaching post at Yale Divinity School. The move, we find, had little to do with Wiman looking for a more “meaningful” role than with discrepancies between his personality and the Poetry job’s demands. He’s more inclined to penning a poem on his train ride to the office than wrangling Poetry’s suddenly massive budget. Leaving Poetry seems a fairly easy decision for Wiman, but I suspect his ability to walk away from such an esteemed post is related to his long quest to understand the relationship between art and faith, that the hard work he’s done to disentangle poetry from salvation—in work, in relationships, in sickness—prevents him from equating his identity with his Very Important Job.

At my own moderately important job, I began to disappear within a matter of weeks. A toxic and emotionally dysfunctional environment effaced itself as a test of my own intellect and will, a test I quickly realized I would not pass. I gritted my teeth and mustered the manic energy to get through each workday, only to collapse into a despair-like exhaustion within the first hour of leaving that acerbic office. Depressed, I hacked away at a novel in the evenings, drinking alone to numb the day and forestall my fantasies about what unforeseen humiliations awaited me in the next, tamping down the unsettling and undeniable fact that the job I thought would bring me closer to the “heart of creation itself” had brought me to the edge of a void. You signed up for this, I told myself, blaming myself while patting my own back. In no time, the novel—the actual art I’d sworn to pursue— took on the quality of so much fiction written by a depressed person: All of the characters were depressed. The limitless scope of human emotion I’d so desperately wanted to explore reduced itself to three or four variations of the same dejected malaise; “brooding clouds” figured heavily in the text. Still, I trusted that something important was happening to my soul, that feeling terrible all the time was the necessary cost of a meaningful artistic life.

Wiman’s mortality, and his gradual but profound embrace of faith in the grip of a rare bone cancer, was the primary subject of Abyss. Radical Light, on the other hand, draws primarily upon the lives, work, and deaths of other poets—Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, C.K. Williams, and Phillip Larkin, among others—and courts the occasional temptation to revel in the glow of literary celebrity. But Wiman, having lived the life most writers would envy, cuts such romantic illusions off at the quick. His authority privileges him with witnessing firsthand the tension between the lives of our world’s greatest poets and their transcendent poems. His proximity to those figures, in their lives and in some cases their deaths, affirms the recurring conundrum that, more often than not, a poem’s truth may elude the poet who wrote it. In his work, Phillip Larkin inches toward a Void he won’t call God but can proceed no further than the page allows; Seamus Heaney confesses to Wiman that faith keeps breaking free of the language he’s so ardently crafted in his lyrical life. Time and time again, the people most capable of unlocking the kingdom’s doors have begun to doubt the efficacy of their keys.

I had been in Seattle for one year and felt myself on the verge of an emotional, mental, and spiritual collapse. I was spent and cynical, paranoid and thin. I slept too much or not enough, avoided crowds but feared true silence. I dreamed of running from angry religious clowns. I had swapped a conviction for art’s civic and spiritual value for a bitter disdain towards earnest expressions of both faith and art, like Indiana Jones swapping gold for a bag of sand. My triune method of self-preservation—endorphins, prayer, and beer—wasn’t cutting it anymore. For the first time since I’d started the job, I managed to call friends and family and tell them what had been happening, to confess that for the last year I had been unraveling in secret. It took hours to explain the situation, how day in and day out I allowed myself to be a witness in the petty theft of my own self-worth, my passion for the written word, my love of life in general—all of it there and then suddenly not, as if by slight of hand. I’d kept all this hidden for one main reason: admitting to anyone else that my dream job turned out to be a nightmare would mean admitting it to myself. Quit, they said. Now.

Wiman frequently mentions his “wriggling on the hook” of ambition for the first several years of his writing career. At first, I pictured the kind of hook where you might hang your keys, a holding place fastened to a wall, dangling something. This gives the impression of ambition as toil and nothing else, and by extension may encourage a crude dismissal of ambition altogether, may temp an ambitious person to hate the hook for snagging him at all. But Wiman’s careful treatment of the the metaphor suggests that the Hook has a more mysterious function beyond restraint, beyond wriggle and toil. “For a time I would say I was released from this hook by faith…” he says, alluding perhaps to the moments recounted in Abyss when art could no longer withstand death’s weight, and faith buoyed him. But he continues: “But I would also say that it was ambition that released me from ambition.”

The night I wrote my resignation letter, wildfires burned north and south of Seattle, in Canada and Oregon, and the smoke had carried on the winds of a heat wave to settle over the city like a lusterless fog. The temperature hovered above eighty until well after midnight, so by the time I finished writing I was covered in sweat. It may have been the sirens bleeding through my open windows, or the smell of smoke lingering on the wind, but I couldn’t help but feel like I’d committed some terribly selfish crime, like quitting the job meant quitting the life I’d committed to living.

It is in wriggling on the hook—in his ambition to write poetry and live a life worthy of the standard he previously put forth—where Wiman discovers the ultimate insufficiency of his or anyone else’s art. And it is in acknowledging this insufficiency that his art becomes true, where it shape-shifts into grace.

I
no longer believe that suffering in a tedious and dehumanizing literary
non-profit job was part of some holy artistic struggle. I could have wriggled
anywhere; depression is not a pre-requisite for grace, and despair is not the
only key to breakthrough. It was in recognizing that my struggle there was not
a sacred one that I finally allowed the hook to do its work. The hook—“both God
and Void, grace and pain”—holds us whether we wriggle or not.

“The best way out,” Wiman reminds us, quoting Frost, “is always through.” I knew, when I turned in my resignation, that the collapse I had been staving off through denial and repression would quickly follow. I knew that the loneliness I felt both in the job and outside of it, the despair which had begun to seep through the cracks of my denial, would not dissipate when I acknowledged their presence. But I also knew, finally, that the diminishment of a self was not the same as true artistic or spiritual sacrifice.

And
I knew that for a long time I would feel like I had failed—failed to become the
dynamic literary pro I once wanted to be, failed to write my novel, failed to
transform in the way I imagined I would when I packed up my car and moved across
the country for that job. In those ways, I really had failed, and it was
painful to see those dreams dry up. But sometimes it’s not until a dream is deferred
that we can recognize its insufficiency, its utter wackness as a dream.

“Failure,”
Christian Wiman concludes, “is our only savior.” It is the poet’s failures, his
myriad brushes with death in poetry and life, which give him the authority to
make such a claim. The rest of us have to find out for ourselves, as often and
as fully as we can.

Paul Anderson
is an Illinois native who lives and writes in Seattle. He is an Instructor of Writing at Seattle Pacific University and is currently at work on his first novel, along with a collection of essays about youth sports culture in America.

From across the bookstore, it flashes at me like the plumage of a wild bird seeking a mate: one of those small gold circles indicative of acclaim. And, frankly, I’m a little turned on. I already know I like shiny gold things; could this be a PEN finalist? A Pulitzer Prize winner? Up close, it turns out to be The Omnivore’s Dilemma – one of The New York Times‘ “Best Books of the Year.” To this honor, the inside flap appends the following:

Gold Medal in Nonfiction for the California Book Award
Winner of the 2007 Bay Area Book Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2007 James Beard Book Award/Writing on Food Category
Finalist for the 2007 Orion Book Award
Finalist for the 2007 NBCC Award

What does this list tell me? It depends, perhaps, on the speed at which I’m reading. At a quick glance, each accolade works like a word-of-mouth recommendation; together, they suggest that this book is worth my time. Closer inspection also helps refine my generic expectations: clearly, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a work of nonfiction about food, written by a Northern Californian whom book critics like (and possibly containing an element of science fiction? I suppose I could look up the “Orion Book Award,” but I prefer to imagine that it portends space aliens or time travel.)

However, were I to take the list in the spirit in which the publisher has proffered it – to embrace the assumption that these awards have some settled empirical meaning – The Omnivore’s Dilemma might, paradoxically, start to look second-rate. Sure, it was the best book in California, in 2007 (a weak vintage for Californian nonfiction, if memory serves), but there are 49 other states, and at the national level, it was merely a “finalist.” What I want to know is, Who won the NBCC that year? Maybe I should go read that book instead.

Of course no one is this literal-minded, and thank goodness for that – The Omnivore’s Dilemma turns out to be one of the best books I’ve read in months. But what its flap copy tells me about prizes is mainly that there are an awful lot of them. The NBCC. The NBA. The Newberry. The Nobel. The proliferating PENs: /Faulkner, /Hemingway, /Nabokov… The Governor General’s and The Giller. Commonwealth and Orange and Costa (née Whitbread, not to be confused with Whiting). The Pushcart, The O. Henry, The Paris Review/Aga Khan, The Story Prize. There are so many prizes, in fact, that we at The Millionsstarted a series to keep track of them. (Our “Prizewinners: International Edition” suggests that the mania for awards is not confined to Anglo-American letters; Spaniards, for example, have a whole host of regional honors).

It may be worth bearing in mind, though, that many of these seemingly venerable prizes are no older than the mobile phone. Thirty-five years ago, fewer than half of the above awards existed. It’s also interesting that hand-wringing about the health of book culture was at that time less pronounced. While correlation is not evidence of causation, it would appear that the spread of those little gold circles – which project, in the wilds of the bookstore, an aura of critical consensus – is in reality a response to a crisis of authority. These days, everyone’s got an opinion. Should everyone, then, get an award? Or, to put it bluntly: are there too many prizes?

The answer to this question depends on how we perceive the function, or functions, of literary prizes. I would argue that they do several valuable things. First, in an era when column-inches for book coverage are disappearing from our major newspapers, they offer publishers free promotion for books that deserve it. (Or nearly free; I’m sure they pay a couple cents per gross to the little gold sticker factory.) And we Americans respond to prizes. In the best cases, as when the Nobel alerts us to a Herta Müeller or an Imre Kertész, a worthy author immediately finds a broader audience. In other cases – the Pulitzer, most years – an author of whom people were already aware gets a dispensation to stop worrying about whether her next book will sell. It will.

Literary prizes may also offer writers in whose lives rejection, penury, and doubt are the rule (which is to say, almost all writers) a financial and psychological vote of confidence. Conferred on an author who has yet to find a sustaining audience, a prize purse may act as a kind of fellowship, subsidizing another three or six months of work – $10,000 here to Ron Currie, Jr.; $10,000 there to Jessie Ball. Even the ubiquitous Pushcart Prize nomination – though there must be a thousand of them every year – lets the writer know that someone out there is paying attention. (In this light, Alice Munro‘s decision to recuse herself from the Giller competition last summer looks honorable. She’s already won it twice. Give that money and recognition to someone who can use it.)

Also: Prizes are fun. The most interesting of them seem to make a virtue of subjectivity, or to dismiss, by transparency of design, any pretenses to Olympian objectivity. I’ve always been partial to the International IMPAC Dublin’s huge and heterodox longlist of librarian-nominated titles from around the world. And on the Internet, conferring an honor is a matter of keystrokes. Among the most enjoyable of the recent spate of prizes is The Morning News‘ Tournament of Books. With its parodic structure, its color commentary, and its Zombie Round, the TOB simultaneously serves the functions mentioned above and punctures the premises of, say, the Pulitzer. Laying bare its mechanisms, it is the most postmodern of prizes.

In my view, however, all this award-granting gets silly whenever prize-granting bodies short-circuit the practical virtues of prizes – promotion, encouragement, and pleasure. They do this in two opposed but mutually reinforcing ways: first, by contriving prizes so commonplace or parochial as to carry hardly any cultural weight. Second, by attaching to a single prize more significance than any award should rightly carry… by eliding the plurality of critical judgments in favor of some settled, authoritative Best. This sounds like a fuzzy distinction, even to me, but a couple of recently minted prizes may help to clarify what I mean.

The first is the St. Francis College Literary Prize for a fourth book of fiction. “What’s the best fourth book of fiction?” would have been a great parlor game or blog debate. But with no sign of the college trustees’ tongues being in their cheeks, the design of this prize was so narrow – its proxy for “midcareer” so arbitrary – that it seemed to me to verge on parody. In theory, the prize was to offer “significant…support” to a writer at a crucial juncture. In practice, it was an occasion to give $50,000 to Aleksandar Hemon (who had just won half a million from the MacArthur Foundation)… and to get him to come lecture at St. Francis College. Then again, Hemon is a terrific writer, and we can take these things with a grain of salt, can’t we?

A more egregious offender, in my view, is the Man Booker International Prize, new as of 2005. With its widely publicized betting odds, the Booker once seemed to acknowledge that literary prizes are as much sporting event as science. Over time, however, the prize grew popular enough to attract the sponsorship of The Man Group plc, and with it a ceaseless pursuit of the best of the best. There’s the longlist; the shortlist; the Booker where all the Bookers of the given time period are Bookered against each other (The Best of the Booker, The Booker of Bookers)… and now: The International Booker:
The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. In seeking out literary excellence the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel…. The Man Booker International Prize is unique in the world of literature in that it can be won by an author of any nationality, providing that his or her work is available in the English language.
Well, yes, because the Nobel can be won by an author of any nationality, period. But more broadly: whom does this prize serve? What would it mean for Jane Smiley et al to have declared E.L. Doctorow superior to V.S. Naipaul in 2009, or vice versa? Do these writers need the 60,000 pounds? Notoriety? The good opinion of Jane Smiley? Was this award even fun to talk about? I may be missing something – feel free to correct me in the comments – but does anyone even remember who won?

Together, The St. Francis College Prize and The International Booker delimit the double-action that characterizes literary culture in the digital age. On the one hand, pronouncements proliferate democratically, even as their prestige diminishes; on the other hand, institutions that have amassed authority under the old dispensation scramble to capitalize on what remains of it. We may look forward, on the one hand, to the Nobel of Nobels, and on the other, to the Award for Best Third Collection of Short Short Fiction by a Southpaw. Lucky for readers, though, I have a modest proposal, a compromise that might save us from all that. I believe it fulfills the core functions of literary prizes and encourages cooperation among competing prize-mongers, while nakedly retaining the flavor of arbitrary silliness. With apologies to The Morning News, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the Prize Championship Series.

Now all I need is for the heads of the various prize-granting bodies to agree to participate, or perhaps for President Obama to weigh in. That shouldn’t be hard. In the meantime, I can offer only a stopgap solution to the problem of prizes: Perhaps we should decide how seriously to take any one of them based on whether it seeks to start a conversation or to end one.

Being a reader is like playing tricks with time. You turn the page of the fictional story while an hour of your own passes. The characters breathe, laugh and cry, and so do you. When you finish their tale, you close the book and set it aside, dreaming of their ever-after, while stepping out into yours.